Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Zeno’s Conscience

When you see someone smoking the first impulse may be to
shoot out a warning like “you shouldn’t smoke it will kill you” or simply the
notice imprinted on packets, like this one, “ SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING. Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema And May Complicate Pregnancy."You might even offer the example of a person you have known, a heavy smoker who
died of lung cancer. Though the intentions of such jeremiads, which often
result from fear of loss, are obviously good, the net effect might be to drive a smoker to drink or at the very least make him or her seek a safe hiding spot where they can further indulge their habit. The smoker may reach for a cigarette simply to quell the anxiety
created by the urgency of the warning. Smokers, drinkers and drug addicts, who
have incurred a variety of problems resulting from their addictions, have all
been made to witness horrible documentaries in which the scourge of the poisons
of nicotine, alcohol or opiates are dramatically presented. But how many are
converted by these messages. The mind is a wonderful labyrinth of defenses that
all conspire to allow stagnation and even deterioration if that is the dominating drive, as it so often is in addictive personalities. The
addiction itself is providing a function. So what to do when you see someone
you care about bathed in a cloud of smoke, of booze, of opium? You might hand
the smoker a copy of Italo Svevo’sZeno’s Conscience: A Novel, whose protagonist turns to psychoanalysis in his
attempt to cure his smoking habit and a lifetime of other problems. The book is full of humor and irony and
offers no practical answers to the problem. It's also guaranteed to lower
rather than raise the adrenalin of its reader which, on a short term basis,
might at least create one degree of separation between the urge and the
compulsive need to satisfy it. If the problem is bad enough that the smoker is
suffering from emphysema or the drinker from pancreatitis, it may be time for a
so-called intervention. Or it might be time simply to step back and offer your
prayers and thoughts. They’ll get you drunk before you get them sober is a
popular AA expression. And if that smoker’s implacable urge to go up in smoke
is going to drive you to drink then the best and only thing you can do is to
practice that form of love which seeks no reward.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.